Teleportation Gates

Yes, I could design something like that for the keep, I won't. You feel safe having a back door, one we can't lock, into the bailey? We'll stick to the traditional circle and like it. The Gods know we have enough enemies, between the dragon, the orcs we threw out of the valley, the gnolls we had to keep from coming into the valley, and tax collectors.

— Thelun Arkady, Pendelholm Arcanist

The gates were usually built in the form of an arch or paired pillars, and engraved with arcane runes. These runes serve both as the identification for the location, and the focus for the spell embedded in the gate. Once invoked, the spell will generate an open portal from the point of origin to another gate location specified during the invocation. Most of the original gates were made large enough for a simple horse-drawn cart to move through, and the transition is made instantaneously, as though walking through an open door. This was developed to save valuable travel time, allowing perishable goods to travel a distance usually taking weeks within a few minutes. The only major limitations on these teleportation gates were threefold: the destination runes must be known, the destination cannot currently be open to another location, and the travel could only be done while both origin and destination were in sunlight. As these early forms of teleportation only required knowledge of the spell and destination, anyone talented enough could use the gates. For the creators of the gates, this was considered a design goal; for those who inherited control of the gates, it instead was found to be a design flaw.

The Dark Era brought with it a very deep distrust of arcane magic, but the gates were one of the first pieces of magic which drew negative attention. After all, if an enemy only needed to have a capable arcanist and your destination runes then they could very easily move an army through with little warning. This led to many gate locations being destroyed outright, so they could never be used against the people currently holding that territory. Some were more cautious, trying to remove portions of the physical structure to interrupt the location - with the hope of replacing the missing part would allow the gate to work again. This was found not to be the case, but these gates were now inactive and no longer a threat. In time, the Rhyliss Empire captured one of these inactive sites, and made records of it before dismantling the gate completely.

Legacy

After the creation of the Imperial Arcanists, study began on the notes which had been carefully preserved. Those notes formed the foundation for more modern forms, such as the teleportation ritual circle. These circles use two concentric engravings, one of which constitutes the teleportation spell itself while the inner ring functions as the 'identifier'. The benefits of these ritual circles in comparison is the ability to alter the runes which function as its identifier without needing to recreate it from nothing. This, along with other more recent discoveries, allow some security measures to be taken in limiting who can use the circle. For instance, each rune has a word associated with it, and there are spells to send words to a particular person privately. This means it is possible to replace one rune with another in the identifier, then inform those who are allowed to use the destination of the change. Similarly, the circle does not open a portal so much as to translocate individuals and objects within a ten-foot circle to the destination.

More interestingly, the lost dwarven kingdom of Azanbur adapted the teleportation gate into something more secure, yet less useful. They developed a teleportation gate which was technically "always active", but having no visual sign of their magic. It would only teleport those who passed through the gate while possessing a specific token. Thus more than a few special gates were made to hide secrets, serving as the only entry to restricted areas. These gates were known to exist, but the details on how they functioned and how dwarves solved some of the theoretical issues became lost when Azanbur fell. The secret of these "hidden gates" was lost and various attempts to recreate them have failed.